? ' r NIETZSCHE: 

| ] ( c By PAUL ELMER MORE 




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NIETZSCHE 




itivtrf/k J\J U'Z,)/kt 



NIETZSCHE 



BY 



PAUL ELMER MORE 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

1912 






COPYRIGHT, 191 2, BY PAUL ELMER MORE 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published February iqi2 



.0° 



©CIA305671 



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NIETZSCHE 



NIETZSCHE 

If the number of books written 
about a subject is any proof of inter- 
est in it, Nietzsche must have become 
one of the most popular of authors 
among Englishmen and Americans. 
Besides the authorized version of his 
Works appearing under the editorial 
care of Dr. Levy, 1 every season for the 
past three or four years has brought 
at least one new interpretation of his 
theories or biography of the man. 
Virtually all of these books are com- 
posed by professed and uncritical ad- 

1 The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. 
The first complete and authorized English trans- 
lation. Edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. London: 
T. N. Foulis; New York: The Macmillan Co. 
1 8 volumes. Eight volumes have already ap- 
peared. 

3 



NIETZSCHE 



mirers, but even without rectifying 
our judgment by comparison with the 
equally violent diatribes of his enemies 
in German, we can see the figure of 
Nietzsche beginning to stand out in 
its true character. He was not quite 
the Galahad of philosophy that he 
appeared to his sister; 1 above all we 
begin to see that the roots of disease 
were more deeply implanted in his 
nature than those would have us be- 
lieve who think to find in his works a 
return to sanity and strength; yet 
neither was he the monster of im- 
morality which frightened us when 
first his theories began to be bruited 

1 Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche's. Von Elisa- 
beth Forster-Nietzsche. Leipzig, 1895, 1897, 
1904. - — The best biography in English is The 
Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, by Daniel Halevy; 
translated [from the French] by J. M. Hone; 
New York: The Macmillan Co., 191 1. 

4 



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abroad. The stern, calculating Super- 
man turns out on inspection to be a 
creature of quivering nerves and of 
extreme sensitiveness to the opinion of 
his fellows, yet with a vein of daunt- 
less resolution through it all. 



Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 
to give his full baptismal name, was 
born in the little village of Rocken, 
October 15, 1844. His father, a Lu- 
theran clergyman of scholarly and 
musical tastes, suffered a severe fall 
when the child was four years old, and 
died after a short period of mental 
aberration. In 1850 the widow went 
with her son and her daughter Elisa- 
beth to live with her husband's mo- 
ther and sister in Naumburg-an-der- 
Saale. There Friedrich grew to be a 
5 



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solemn, thoughtful boy, nicknamed 
by his comrades "the little pastor." 
With his sister and one or two 
friends he raised about himself a fan- 
tastic world of the imagination, in 
which he played many heroic roles. 
Yet always he felt himself alone 
and set apart. "From childhood/' 
he wrote in his boyish journal, "I 
sought solitude, and found my happi- 
ness there where undisturbed I could 
retire into myself." 

At the age of fourteen he received a 
scholarship at the school of Pforta, 
situated on the Saale about five miles 
from Naumburg. In this cloistered 
institution, where the ancient dis- 
cipline of the Cistercian founders still 
prevailed over its Protestant curricu- 
lum, Nietzsche acquired that thorough 
grounding in the classics which served 
6 



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him later in his philological studies; 
and for a while he felt in his heart the 
influence of the religious, almost mon- 
astic, life. But the spirit of weariness 
and rebellion soon supervened. " The 
existence of God," he wrote in an 
exercise for a literary society, "im- 
mortality, the authority of the Bible, 
Revelation, and the like, will forever 
remain problems. I have attempted 
to deny everything: ah, to destroy is 
easy, but to build up ! " And further: 
"Very often submission to the will of 
God and humility are but a covering 
mantle for cowardly hesitation to face 
our destiny with determination." — 
So early was the boy preluding to the 
life-work of the man. 

At Pforta, Nietzsche had become 
intimate with Paul Deussen (after- 
wards the eminent Oriental scholar 
7 



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and disciple of Schopenhauer), and 
with Deussen and another friend he 
began his university career at Bonn. 
But from his comrades there he soon 
fled, "like a fugitive/' he says, and 
went to Leipzig. These were his days 
of Sturm und Drang. Here he came 
under the influence that was to shape 
his whole literary career. Chancing 
one day at a bookshop on a copy of 
The World as Will and Representation, 
he heard as it were a daemon whisper- 
ing in his ear: " Take the book home 
with you." This was his Tolle, lege; 
the message had found him. Rebel as 
he might in later years against Scho- 
penhauer's pessimistic doctrine of 
blind, unmeaning will; try as he might 
to construct a positive doctrine out of 
that blank negation, he never got the 
poison out of his blood. Much of the 
8 



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pose and lyric misanthropy of T^ara- 
thustra is really an echo of what he 
read in his room on that fateful day. 
It is probable, too, that his careful use 
of language is partly due to the in- 
fluence of Schopenhauer. In Leipzig 
also he met the man who was to be 
the great joy and the great torment of 
his life. One memorable evening, at 
the house of a friend, he was intro- 
duced , to Wagner, heard him play 
from the Meister singer, and learnt 
that the "musician of the future" 
was a disciple of Schopenhauer. 

Meanwhile he had not neglected 
his classical studies and had already 
published several philological essays 
in the Rheinisches Museum. In 1869, 
through the recommendation of his 
master and friend, Ritschl, he was 
appointed Professor of Philology in 
9 



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the University of Basle, and took up 
his residence in the Swiss town, not 
without misgivings over his youth and 
his unfitness for the routine of teach- 
ing. Nevertheless, he threw himself 
into the task with zeal and was, in 
the beginning at least, successful with 
the students. 

At that time Richard and Cosima 
Wagner were living in seclusion at 
Triebschen on the lake of the Four 
Cantons, not far from Lucerne, while 
the master was completing his great 
tetralogy. Here Nietzsche renewed 
the acquaintance which had been be- 
gun at Leipzig, and was soon deeply 
absorbed in Wagner's ideas and ambi- 
tions. "I have found a man," he 
wrote in a letter after his first visit to 
Triebschen, " who more than any other 
reveals to me the image of what Scho- 
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penhauer calls ' genius/ and who is 
quite penetrated with that wonderful, 
fervent philosophy. . . . No one knows 
him and can judge him, because all 
the world stands on another basis and 
is not at home in his atmosphere. In 
him rules an ideality so absolute, a 
humanity so profound and moving, an 
earnestness of life so exalted, that in 
his presence I feel myself as in the 
presence of the divine." Under the 
sway of this admiration Nietzsche 
wrote and published his first book, 
The Birth of Tragedy, in which he 
broke lance with the pedantic routine 
of philology as then taught in the 
universities, and held up the Wagner- 
ian opera as a reincarnation of the 
spirit of Greek tragedy and as the art 
of the future. "Anything more beau- 
tiful than your book I have never read ! 
ii 



NIETZSCHE 



all is noble!" was the comment of the 
complaisant master. Nietzsche al- 
ways maintained that those were the 
happiest days of his life; for a little 
while he was excited out of imprison- 
ing egotism and caught up into an- 
other egotism greater than his own. 
But the cause of his happiness was 
also the cause of its instability. No 
doubt the scandalous rupture between 
the two friends was due in part to 
philosophical differences, for in the 
Wagnerian opera Nietzsche came 
later to see all the elements of roman- 
tic idealism which were most abhor- 
rent to him. But deeper yet lay the 
inevitable necessity that two person- 
alities, each of which sought to absorb 
the world into itself, should separate 
with fire and thunder. In his last days 
Nietzsche insinuated that there had 

12 



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been love between him and Cosima, 
but this was no doubt a delusion of 
madness. The friendship and quarrel 
are easily explained as a tragic and 
humorous incident of romanticism. 

But to return to Basle. The routine 
of university life soon became irksome 
to Nietzsche. He felt within himself 
the stirring of a new philosophy, to de- 
velop which he needed leisure and in- 
dependence. His health, too, began to 
alarm him. In one of the recesses of 
his Leipzig years he had been drafted 
into a Prussian regiment of artillery, 
despite his exemption due to short 
sight, and had served reluctantly but 
faithfully, until released on account of 
an injury caused by falling from his 
horse. His strength was never the 
same after that, though the seat of 
his disease was deeper than any acci- 
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dental hurt. At Basle he began to 
suffer severely from insomnia and 
various nervous ailments, and at last, 
in 1879, he broke his connection with 
the university, and went out into the 
world to seek health and to publish 
his new gospel. 

For a while he lived with his sister, 
and projected with her great schemes 
for a kind of monastic seminary, 
wherein a few noble spirits, dissatis- 
fied with the world and, needless to 
add, devoted to himself, should dwell 
together and from their studious se- 
clusion pour out a stream of phil- 
osophy to regenerate society. After 
his sister left him — they parted not 
on the best of terms — he passed his 
time in Italy and Switzerland. He 
was always a lover of the mountains, 
and especially in the pure air of the 



NIETZSCHE 



Engadine he found temporary relief for 
the ills of the body and refreshment 
of spirit after contact with unsympa- 
thetic mankind. He walked much, 
and his later books — with the excep- 
tion of Zarathustra, which possesses 
some thread of composition — are 
not much more than miscellaneous 
collections of pensees jotted down as 
they came to him by the way. A 
flattering portrait of him in these 
lonelier years was drawn by his en- 
thusiastic disciple, Fraulein Meta von 
Salis-Marschlins, in her Philosopk und 
Edelmensch. Not all was yet cloud 
and gloom about his brooding soul, 
and the Superman was still capable of 
gay comradeship and of the most ap- 
proved German revery over the beau- 
ties of nature. His conversation, when 
he felt at ease, was copious and bril- 



NIETZSCHE 



liant. But he was slipping more and 
more into bitter, self-consuming soli- 
tude. "I have forty-three ^years be- 
hind me,'^ h6 \wrot£ one day, "and 
am as alonfe as if I were a child." x 
The end was unrelieved darkness. 
With the neglect or vilification of his 
books, ^ith^the alienation of one 
friend after another, and with the 
growth of the taint in his blood, his 
self-absorption developed into fitful 
illusions and downright megalomania. 
His last work he called Ecce Homo, 
and toBrandes, the well-known critic, 
he wrote: — 

Friend George, — Since you have 
discovered me, it is not wonderful to 
find me: what is now difficult is to lose 
me. 

The Crucified. 
16 



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After lingering some time in imbe- 
cility under the care of his sister at 
Weimar, he died on the 25th of 
August, 1900. ^ *■; 



II 

One may begin the perusal of the 
life of Nietzsche with a feeling of 
repulsion for the man, — at least that, 
I confess, was my own experience, — 
but one can scarcely lay it down with- 
out pity for his tragic failures, and 
without something like admiration 
for his reckless devotion to ideas. 
And all through the reading one is 
impressed by the truth which his 
ardent worshipper, Fraulein von Salis- 
Marschlins, has made the keynote of 
her characterization : "He — and this 
is the salient point — condemned a 
whole class of feelings in their ex- 
cess, not because he did not have 
them, but just because he did have 
them and knew their danger." That 
18 



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truth is as important for judging the 
man as for understanding his philo- 
sophy. He was a man terribly at war 
with himself, and in this very breach in 
his nature lies the attraction — power- 
fully felt but not always clearly under- 
stood — of his works for the modern 
world. No doubt, if we look into the 
causes of his growing popularity, we 
shall find that a considerable part of 
his writing is just the sort of spas- 
modic commonplace that enraptures 
the half-cultured and flatters them 
with thinking they have discovered a 
profound philosophical basis for their 
untutored emotions. But withal he 
cannot be quite so easily disposed of. 
He may be, like Poe, "three-fifths 
of him genius and two-fifths mere 
fudge "; but the inspired part of him 
is the provocative and, it might be 
19 



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said, final expression of one side of 
the contest between the principles of 
egotism and sympathy that for two 
centuries and more has been waging 
for the polity and morals of the 
world. We cannot rightly understand 
Nietzsche unless we find his place in 
this long debate, and to do this we 
must take a rapid glance backward. 

The problem to which Nietzsche 
gives so absolute an answer was de- 
finitely posed in the eighteenth cen- 
tury, but its peculiarity is best shown 
by comparing it with the issue — dif- 
ferent in substance though somewhat 
similar in terms — of the preceding 
age. To the dominant moralists of 
the seventeenth century the basis of 
human nature was a pure egotism. 
La Rochefoucauld gave the most fin- 
ished expression to this belief in his 
20 



NIETZSCHE 



doctrine of amour-propre, displaying 
itself in a vanity that takes pleasure 
in the praise of ourselves and a jeal- 
ousy that takes umbrage at the praise 
of others. In England the motive of 
egotism had already been developed 
by Hobbes into a complete philosophy 
of the State. " In the first place/' said 
Hobbes, "I put forth, for a general 
inclination of all mankind, a perpet- 
ual and restless desire of power after 
power, that ceaseth only in death." 
The natural condition of mankind, 
therefore, is that every man's hand 
should be against every other man, 
and society is the result of a compact 
by which individuals, since each is 
unable to defend himself alone against 
the passions of all others, are driven 
to mutual concessions. The contrary 
principle of natural sympathy was in- 

21 



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volved in the political theories of 
Grotius and his followers. It is even 
more fully implied in the vagaries of 
certain of the sects commonly called 
Levellers, underlying, for example, the 
protest of the fanatic company of Dig- 
gers who, when arrested for starting 
a communistic settlement in Surrey, 
declared that "the time of deliverance 
was at hand; and God would bring 
His People out of slavery, and restore 
them to their freedom in enjoying the 
fruits and benefits of the Earth. . . . 
That their intent is to restore the 
Creation to its former condition. . . . 
That the times will suddenly be, when 
all men shall willingly come and give 
up their lands and estates, and submit 
to this Community of Goods." 

In this opposition of Hobbes's no- 
tion of the natural condition of man 
22 



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as one of warfare, with the humble 
effort of the Diggers to restore man- 
kind to a primitive state of equality 
and fraternity, one may see foreshad- 
owed the ethical theories of self-inter- 
est and benevolence which were to be 
developed in the next century. But 
there was an element in the theoriz- 
ing of the seventeenth century which 
quite separates these men from their 
successors. Above the idea of nature 
hovered, more or less distinctly, the 
idea of a supernatural power. Even 
Hobbes, though he was repudiated by 
his own party as an atheist, completes 
his conception of the civil common- 
wealth dependent on the law of nature 
with a Christian commonwealth based 
on supernatural revelation and the 
will of God. So, on the other hand, 
the political schemes of fraternity 
23 



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were almost universally subordinate 
to notions of theocratic government. 
Of purely natural sympathy, as it 
was later to be developed into the 
sole source of virtue, the epoch had 
comparatively little thought. This dis- 
tinction is of the utmost importance 
in the history of ethics, and may be 
rendered more precise by considera- 
tion of a few lines from that erudite 
scholar, but crabbed poet, Dr. Henry 
More. In his Cupid? s Conflict the 
Platonist becomes almost lyrical when 
this theme is touched : — 

When I my self from mine own self do quit 
And each thing else; then an all-spreaden love 
To the vast Universe my soul doth fit, 
Makes me half equall to All-seeing Jove. 

My mightie wings high stretch'd then clap- 
ping light 
I brush the starres and make them shine 
more bright. 

24 



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Then all the works of God with close embrace 
I dearly hug in my enlarged arms, 
All the hid paths of heavenly Love I trace 
And boldly listen to his secret charms. 

The same idea occurs more than once 
in the mystical doctor's prose, which 
was, if truth be told, a good deal more 
poetical than his verse. "And even 
the more Miserable Objects in this 
present Scene of things," he some- 
where writes, "cannot divest him of 
his Happiness, but rather modifie 
it; the Sweetness of his Spirit being 
melted into a kindly compassion in the 
behalf of Others : Whom if he be able 
to help, it is a greater Accession to 
his Joy; and if he cannot, the being 
Conscious to himself of so sincere 
a compassion, and so harmonious 
and suitable to the present State of 
things, carries along with it some 
25 



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degree of Pleasure, like Mournful 
Notes of Musick exquisitely well 
fitted to the Sadness of the Ditty." 

It is clear that this sense of com- 
passion is a motive utterly different in 
kind from the sympathy which meant 
so much to the next age;' to pass from 
one to the other a great principle had 
to be eliminated from the philosophy 
of human conduct, and this principle 
was manifestly the sense of the divine, 
of the infinite which stood apart from 
mortal passions and of which some 
simulacrum resided in the human 
breast. The man who effected this 
revolution, partly by virtue of his 
own genius and partly as spokes- 
man of his time, was John Locke, 
whose Essay Concerning Human Un- 
derstanding, published in 1690 as 
the result of eighteen years of refiec- 
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tion, became the bible, so to speak, of 
the next century. Locke did not ex- 
pressly deny the existence of a super- 
natural world. To explain our sense of 
morality he still had recourse to a law 
of God imposed upon man by decree 
and without any corresponding law in 
nature; and he began his philosophi- 
cal discussion by a kind of apology, 
declaring that "God having endued 
man with those faculties of knowing 
which he hath, was no more obliged 
by His Goodness to plant those innate 
notions in his mind, than that, having 
given him reason, hands, and mate- 
rials, He should build him bridges or 
houses." But, having thus apologeti- 
cally cleared the field, Locke pro- 
ceeded to elaborate a theory of sen- 
sations and ideas which really leaves 
no place in the human soul for any- 
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thing outside of the phenomenal laws 
of nature. 

One of the first and strangest fruits 
of this new naturalism was Mande- 
ville's Fable of the Bees, which under- 
takes to show by the apologue of a 
hive of bees that the welfare of a 
State is the result of the counterbal- 
ancing of the passions of its individual 
citizens, that, in a word, private vices 
are public virtues : — 

Thus every Part was full of Vice, 
Yet the whole Mass a Paradise. 

The poem in itself was not much more 
than a clever jeu (T esprit, but the Re- 
marks and the Inquiry into the Origin 
of Moral Virtue, which he published in 
defence of his thesis, are among the 
acutest psychological tracts of the 
age. "I believe man," he says, " (be- 
sides skin, flesh, bones, etc., that are 
28 



NIETZSCHE 



obvious to the eye) to be a compound 
of various passions, that all of them, 
as they are provoked and come upper- 
most, govern him by turns, whether 
he will or no." The passions which 
produce the effect of virtue are those 
that spring from pride and the sense 
of power and the desire of luxury. 
"Pity," he adds, "though it is the 
most gentle and the least mischievous 
of all our passions, is yet as much a 
frailty of our nature, as anger, pride, 
or fear. The weakest minds have gen- 
erally the greatest share of it, for 
which reason none are more compas- 
sionate than women and children." 
Such a theory of the passions is a le- 
gitimate, if onesided, deduction from 
the naturalistic philosophy as it left 
the hands of Locke; the ethical con- 
clusions, it will be observed, have a 
29 



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curious similarity with the later sys- 
tem of Nietzsche. The theory of 
Mandeville was too violently in oppo- 
sition to the common sense of man- 
kind to produce much direct influence, 
but it remained as a great scandal of 
letters. It brought the author an in- 
dictment before the grand jury of 
Middlesex for impiety; and as late as 
1765 Diderot, in his criticism of a 
large and inartistic painting, could be 
understood when he exclaimed :" What 
shall we do with such a thing? You 
who defend the Fable of the Bees will 
no doubt say to me that it brings 
money to the sellers of paints and 
canvas. To the devil with sophists! 
With them good and evil no longer 
exist!" 

The real exegete of Locke's Scrip- 
ture, he who made naturalism current 
30 



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by finding within it, without recourse 
to any extrinsic law, a sufficient prin- 
ciple of moral conduct, was David 
Hume. Hume's Treatise of Human 
Nature, published in 1739 an ^ r 74°> 
fell dead from the press, and was in 
part repudiated when, in 1751, he put 
forth his shorter Inquiry into the Prin- 
ciples of Morals. Yet there is in reality 
no fundamental difference between his 
earlier and later theories, and the doc- 
trines which passed to Rousseau and 
Kant were fully and definitely pro- 
nounced in the Treatise written before 
the author had completed his twenty- 
ninth year. Those doctrines had been 
foreshadowed, so to speak, by Shaftes- 
bury, but Shaftesbury, though one of 
the leading influences of the age, was 
too confused or indolent a thinker to 
clear his ideas of the gorgeous rhetoric 
3i 



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that involved them. With Hume 
rhetoric was supplanted by an insati- 
able desire of analysis. He begins by 
resolving the world into an absolute 
flux, wherein the only reality for us is 
a succession of sensations, beyond 
which all is a fiction of the imagina- 
tion. I enter a room and perceive a 
certain chair; if after an interval of 
time I return to the room and per- 
ceive the same chair, the feeling that 
this object of perception and the for- 
mer are identical is merely created by 
my "propensity to feign." Our no- 
tion of cause and effect is likewise a 
fiction, due to the fact that we have 
perceived a certain sequence of phe- 
nomena a number of times, and have 
come to associate them together; we 
have no real assurance that a similar 
sequence will happen another time. 
32 



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And human nature is equally a flux, 
without any element of unity or iden- 
tity. An idea is nothing more than a 
reproduced and fainter sensation, and 
all knowledge is nothing more than 
probability. There is no persistent 
self, but only a "succession of related 
ideas and impressions, of which we 
have an intimate memory and con- 
sciousness." In this flood of sensa- 
tions pleasure and pain alone can be 
the motives of action, and to pleasure 
and pain alone our notion of virtue 
and vice must be ultimately reduced. 
In his analysis of the moral sense 
Hume begins with the conception of 
property, upon which he raises the 
superstructure of society. Self-interest 
is fundamentally opposed to admit- 
ting the claims of others to possession, 
but the only way I can be assured of 
33 



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retaining what I possess is by allowing 
my neighbor to retain what he pos- 
sesses. Justice, then, is a mutual con- 
cession of self-interests for the advan- 
tage of each. A just act is an act that 
is useful at once to society and the 
individual by strengthening the secur- 
ity of property. But a just act is not 
in itself virtuous ; the sense of virtue is 
the agreeable emotion, or passion, as 
Hume calls it, that comes to us when 
we perceive a man perform an act of 
justice which, by the power of throw- 
ing ourselves sympathetically into the 
position of others, we feel to be indi- 
rectly useful to ourselves. The plea- 
surable emotion of self-interest is the 
motive of just action, the pleasurable 
emotion of sympathy with an act of 
justice in which we are not immedi- 
ately concerned is the sense of virtue. 
34 



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Besides this passion of justice which is 
necessary for the very existence of 
society, Hume recognized certain mi- 
nor passions, such as benevolence, 
which are not instigated by mutual 
self-interest, but spring directly from 
the inherent tendency of man to sym- 
pathize with his fellows. Manifestly 
there are serious difficulties in this 
reduction of virtue and vice to agree- 
able and disagreeable passions. It 
leaves no motive for virtue when the 
individual has become conscious of 
the basis of justice in the mutual con- 
cessions of self-interest, and asks why 
he should not foster this concession 
by the appearance of surrendering his 
native rights while secretly grasping 
all in his power; it furnishes no clear 
difference between the passions which 
actuate the hero and the gourmet, be- 
35 



NIETZSCHE 



tween a Nathan Hale uttering his 
regret that he had only one life to give 
for his country and a Talleyrand say- 
ing placidly, a Fate cannot harm me; 
I have dined." The lacunae point to 
some vital error in Hume's philoso- 
phy, but his theory of self-interest and 
sympathy was none the less the first 
clear expression of a revolutionary 
change in thought and morals. 

Twenty years after the date of 
Hume's Treatise his friend Adam 
Smith published The Theory of Moral 
Sentiments j in which the doctrine of 
sympathy was carried a long step for- 
ward. Utility is still the measure of 
virtue and vice, but a man now not 
only has the sense of virtue from sym- 
pathy with an act of justice, but is 
himself led to act justly through a 
sense of sympathy with the feelings 

3 6 



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that his conduct will arouse in others. 
Furthermore, through the habit of 
reflection we come to harbor a kind 
of impersonal sympathy with, or an- 
tipathy to, our own acts similar to 
that which we feel for the acts of 
others. "It is not," says Smith, "the 
love of our neighbor, it is not the love 
of mankind, which upon many occa- 
sions prompts us to the practice of 
those divine virtues. It is a stronger 
love, a more powerful affection, which 
generally takes place upon such occa- 
sions; the love of what is honorable 
and noble, of the grandeur, and dig- 
nity, and superiority of our own char- 
acters." Thus in the system of Adam 
Smith sympathy becomes the actuat- 
ing, cause of virtue and is even able 
to transform self-love into a motive 
wearing the mask of absolute virtue. 



Ill 

Not the least significant feature of 
the advance from Hume's philosophy- 
is the introduction of the word " senti- 
ment" into the title of Adam Smith's 
treatise, for during the remaining 
years of the century the chief devel- 
opment of the doctrine of sympathy 
in England is found in the novelists 
of the sentimental school. "Sentimen- 
tal! what is that?" is the record in 
Wesley's Journal after reading Sterne's 
Sentimental Journey. "It is not Eng- 
lish : he might as well say Continental. 
It is not sense. It conveys no deter- 
minate idea ; yet one fool makes many. 
And this nonsensical word (who 
would believe it?) is become a fash- 
ionable one ! " The hypercritical evan- 

38 



NIETZSCHE 



gelist might have been told that if the 
word conveyed no determinate idea, 
it at least represented a very definite 
force and had a perfectly clear origin. 
It was nothing else but the logical out- 
come of Hume's and Adam Smith's 
theory of sympathy entirely dissev- 
ered from any supernatural principle 
as the source of virtue. From 1760 
to 1768 Sterne was issuing the suc- 
cessive volumes of Tristram Shandy 
and the Sentimental Journey, in which 
this virtue of sentimental sympa- 
thy, reduced to pure sensibility, if 
not to morbidly sensitive nerves, and 
utterly freed from reason or character 
or the law of cause and effect, appears 
full-blown. Whatever practical moral 
these books may have is to be found 
in the episode of my Uncle Toby ten- 
derly letting the buzzing fly out of the 
39 



NIETZSCHE 



window or in the tears of the pilgrim 
over the carcass of a dead ass. If 
Sterne's sentiment was apt to grow a 
trifle maudlin, that of his contempo- 
rary, Henry Brooke, was a constant 
downflow of soul. "This is a book 
of tears," says a modern editor of 
Brooke's Fool of Quality; "but they 
are tears that purge and purify with 
pity and compassion." I am inclined 
to think the purging for many readers 
to-day would come more from ridicule 
than from pity; but the book is nota- 
ble as an attempt to depict a life made 
completely virtuous by the new senti- 
ment of sympathy for all mankind. 
Hearken for a minute to one of the 
sermons of the pious Mentor of the 
story to his youthful charge: — 

I once told you my darling [he says], 
that all the evil which is in you belongs 
40 



NIETZSCHE 



to yourself, and that all the good which 
is in you belongs to your God. . . . 

Remember, therefore, this distinc- 
tion in yourself and all others; remem- 
ber that, when you feel or see any in- 
stance of selfishness, you feel and see 
the coveting, grudging, and grappling 
of the creature; but that, where you 
feel or see any instance of benevolence, 
you feel and see the informing influence 
of your God. All possible vice and mal- 
ignity subsists in the one; all possible 
virtue, all possible beauty, all possible 
blessedness, subsists in the other. 

Now two things are remarkable in 
this passage, and would stand out 
even more plainly if I should quote at 
greater length. First, we have got 
completely away from the utilitarian 
theory of social virtue as a mutual 
concession of self-interests, which was 
4i 



NIETZSCHE 



propounded by Hobbes and essen- 
tially retained by Locke and Hume 
and Adam Smith, though gradually 
overlaid by the modifying power of 
sympathy. In Brooke's philosophy 
self-interest and benevolence are fi- 
nally and absolutely sundered: the 
one is all vice, the other is all virtue. 
And, secondly, we may see here how 
far this newer notion of sympathy 
is removed from the compassion of 
Hobbes's Platonizing contemporary; 
the contrast is even more vivid from 
the fact that Brooke gives a thor- 
oughly Christian turn to the expres- 
sion of the "eternal law of benevo- 
lence," as he calls it. In Henry More 
the "kindly compassion" for the world 
is entirely subsidiary to the rapture 
of a spirit caught up in celestial con- 
templation, whereas in The Fool of 
42 



NIETZSCHE 



Quality love is indeed planted in us by 
a divine hand as a force contrary to 
what Brooke calls "the very horrible 
and detestable nature of Self/' but 
its total meaning and effect are in a 
sentimental dissolution of man's self 
in the idea of humanity. We have 
reached, that is to say, the genuine 
springs of humanitarianism. 

Meanwhile the doctrine of sympa- 
thy had passed in France into the 
pen, if not into the heart, of one whose 
genius was to give it a new color and a 
power sufficient to crush and remould 
societies. It is not necessary to go 
at large into the well-known theories 
of Rousseau. In his Discourse on Ine- 
quality (1755) and his Social Contract 
(1762) he, like his English predeces- 
sors, starts with the motives of self- 
interest and sympathy, but soon gives 
43 



NIETZSCHE 



them a different direction. He saw, as 
did Hobbes and Hume, that property 
depends on the mutual concessions of 
self-interest, but he saw further that 
on this basis alone society and tradi- 
tional morality were in a condition 
of unstable equilibrium, were in fact 
founded on injustice and not on jus- 
tice at all. He perceived no relief 
from this hazardous condition except 
through counteracting self-interest by 
the equally innate and human force of 
sympathy, which was somehow to be 
called into action as the volonte gene- 
rale, or mystical will of the people, 
embracing and absorbing the wills and 
desires of individuals into one har- 
monious purpose. 

One step more and we shall have 
ended this preliminary history of the 
growth of sympathy as the controlling 

44 



NIETZSCHE 



principle of morals. From Rousseau 
it passed into Germany and became 
one of the mainsprings of the roman- 
tic movement. You will find its 
marks everywhere in that literature: 
in the peculiarly sentimental attitude 
towards nature, in the impossible 
yearning of the schone Seelen for 
brotherhood, in the whole philosophy 
of feeling. It lurks in Kant's funda- 
mental rule of morality: "Act on a 
maxim which thou canst will to be 
law universal"; it lives and finds its 
highest expression in Schleiermacher's 
attempt to reunite the individual 
with the infinite by dissolving the 
mind in sympathetic contemplation 
of the flowing universe of things. And 
in this heated, unwholesome atmos- 
phere of German romanticism sprang 
up and blossomed our modern ethics 
45 



NIETZSCHE 



of humanitarianism. The theories of 
socialism are diverse and often super- 
ficially contradictory; they profess to 
stand on a foundation of economic 
law and the necessity of evolution, 
but in reality they spring from Rous- 
seau's ideal of sympathy working 
itself out as a force sufficient in itself 
to combine the endless oppositions of 
self-interest in the volonte generate ,and 
from the romantic conception of the 
infinite as an emotion obtained from 
surrender of self to the universal flux. 
From the former come the political 
schemes of humanitarianism; from 
the latter its religious sanction and 
fanatical intolerance. 



IV 

This survey of the growth of self- 
interest and sympathy may seem a 
long parenthesis in the study of 
Nietzsche, but I do not see how other- 
wise we can understand the problem 
with which he struggled, or the mean- 
ing of his proposed solution. Now, 
Nietzsche's writing is too often, as I 
have said, in a style of spasmodic 
commonplace, displaying a tortured 
effort to appear profound. But it is in 
places also singularly vivid, with a 
power of clinging epithet and a pic- 
turesque exaggeration or grotesque- 
ness that may remind one of Carlyle. 
Consider, for example, part of the 
chapter of Zarathustra entitled Re- 
demption: — 

47 



m 



NIETZSCHE 



As Zarathustra one day passed over 
the great bridge, he was surrounded by 
cripples and beggars, and a hunchback 
spake thus to him: — 

"Behold, Zarathustra, even the peo- 
ple learn from thee, and acquire faith in 
thy doctrine; but for these to believe 
fully in thee, one thing is yet needful — 
thou must first of all convince us crip- 
ples." . . . 

Then answered Zarathustra unto him 
who so spake: . . . Yet is this the 
smallest thing to me since I have been 
amongst men, that one man lacks an 
eye, another an ear, a third a leg, and 
that others have lost their tongue, or 
their nose, or their head. 

I see and have seen a worse thing and 
divers things so monstrous that of all I 
might not speak and of some I might 
not keep silence: I have seen human 
beings to whom everything was lacking, 

4 8 



NIETZSCHE 



except that of one thing they had too 
much — men who are nothing more 
than a big eye, or a big mouth, or a big 
belly, or something else big — reversed 
cripples I name such men. 

And when I came out of my solitude 
and for the first time passed over this 
bridge, then I could not trust my eyes, 
and looked, and looked again, and I 
said at last: "That is an ear! an ear as 
big as a man!" I looked still more at- 
tentively; and actually there did move 
under the ear something that was piti- 
ably small and poor and slim. And in 
truth this immense ear was perched on 
a small thin stalk — and the stalk was a 
man! With a glass before your eyes 
you might even recognize further a tiny 
envious countenance, and also that a 
bloated soullet dangled at the stalk. 
The people told me, however, that the 
big ear was not only a man, but a great 



49 



NIETZSCHE 



man, a genius. But I never believed the 
people when they spake of great men — 
and I hold to my belief that it was a 
reversed cripple, who had too little of 
everything and too much of one 
thing. . . . 

Verily, my friends, I walk amongst 
men as amongst the fragments and 
limbs of men! 

This is the terrible thing to mine eye, 
that I find men broken up and scattered 
as on a field of battle and butchery. 

And when mine eye fleeth from the 
present to the bygone, it findeth always 
the same: fragments and members and 
fearful chance — but no men! 

The present and the bygone upon 
earth — alas, my friends, that is to me 
the intolerable; and I should not know 
how to live were I not a seer also of that 
which must come. 

A seer, a wilier, a creator, a future 



So 



NIETZSCHE 



itself, and a bridge to the future — and, 
alas, also as it were a cripple upon this 
bridge: all that is Zarathustra. . . . 

To redeem what is past, and to trans- 
form every "It was" into "Thus would 
I have it!" — that alone I call redemp- 
tion. . . . 

To will liberateth; but what is that 
named which still putteth the liberator 
in chains ? 

"It was" — so is named the Will's 
gnashing of teeth and loneliest tribula- 
tion. Impotent before the thing that 
has been done, of all the past the Will is 
a malicious spectator. 1 

That is not only an example of 
Nietzsche's vivid and personal style 

1 The quotations from Nietzsche in this essay 
are for the most part based on the authorized 
translations of his works, but I have had the 
German text before me and have altered the 
English at times considerably. 

51 



NIETZSCHE 



at its best, but it also contains the gist 
of his message to the world. For there 
is this to be observed in regard to 
Nietzsche's works: to one who dips 
into them at random, they are likely 
to seem dark and tangled. His man- 
ner of expressing himself in aphorisms 
and of uttering half-truths in emphatic 
finality gives to his writing an appear- 
ance of complexity and groping uncer- 
tainty, if not of self-contradiction; 
but a little persistence in reading soon 
shows that his theory of life, though 
never systematized, was really quite 
simple, and that he had in fact only a 
few ideas which he repeated in end- 
lessly diversified language. Any one 
of his major works will afford a fairly 
complete view of his doctrine : it will 
be found in Human All-Too-Hwman 
to implicate pretty fully the Berg- 
52 



NIETZSCHE 



sonian philosophy and two or three 
other much-vaunted philosophies of 
the self-evolving flux; in Beyond Good 
and Evil the ethical aspects of the new 
liberty are chiefly considered; in Zar- 
athustra, on the whole the greatest 
of his works, he writes in a tone of 
lyrical egotism and prophetic brood- 
ing on his own destiny; in The Will to 
Power there is an attempt to reduce 
his scattered intentions to a logical 
system, but unfortunately that work 
was never finished, and is printed 
largely from his hasty notes. What 
probably first impresses one in any 
of these books is Nietzsche's violent 
antipathy to the past, — " l It was ' — 
so is named the Will's gnashing of 
teeth and loneliest tribulation; impo- 
tent before the thing that has been 
done, of all the past the Will is a 
S3 



NIETZSCHE 

malicious spectator." In this appar- 
ently sweeping condemnation of tra- 
dition all that has been held sacred is 
denounced in language that sounds 
occasionally like the fury of a mad- 
man. So he exclaims: "To the botch- 
ing of mankind and the allowing of 
it to putrefy was given the name 
'God'"; and to our long idealization 
of the eternal feminine he has only the 
brusque reply: "Thou goest to wo- 
men ? Forget not thy whip ! " 

But as we become better versed in 
Nietzsche's extreme manner of ex- 
pression, we find that his condem- 
nation of the past is by no means 
i indiscriminate, that in truth his denun- 
ciations, are directed to a particular 
aspect of history. In the classical 
world this distinction takes the form 
of a harsh and unreal contrast between 
54 



NIETZSCHE 



the Dionysiac principle of unrest and 
growth and creation for which he ex- 
presses the highest regard, and the 
Apollonian principle of rest and re- 
nunciation and contraction for which, 
as Platonism, he has the deepest aver- 
sion. The same distinction really 
holds in his attitude towards religion, 
although here his feelings are not so 
clearly defined. For the Old Testa- 
ment and its virile, human poetry, for 
instance, he admits great reverence, 
reserving his spleen for the New Tes- 
tament and its faith. In one of the 
aphorisms of his virulent attack on if 
Ch ris tianity , entitled app rop r ia tely 
Antichrist, he writes : — 

One does well to put on gloves when 
reading the New Testament. The neigh- 
borhood of so much impurity almost 
forces one to do so. ... I have searched 

55 



NIETZSCHE 



the New Testament in vain for a single 
sympathetic trait; there is nothing in it 
that could be called free, kind, frank, 
upright. Humanity has not taken its 
first steps in this book — instincts of 
purity are lacking. There are only bad 
instincts in the New Testament; and 
there is not even the courage of these 
bad instincts. All is cowardice in it, all 
\Jis closed eyes and self-delusion. Any 
book is pure after one has read the New 
Testament; for example, immediately 
after St. Paul, I read with delight that 
charming wanton mocker, Petronius, of 
whom one might say what Domenico 
Boccaccio wrote about Cesare Borgia 
to the Duke of Parma: e tutto festo. 

To understand these diatribes we 
must remember that there were two 
elements in Christianity as it devel- 
oped in the early centuries : on the one 

56 



NIETZSCHE 



hand, the strong aspiring faith of a 
people in the vigor of youth and eager 
to bring into life fresh and unworn 
spiritual values, and, on the other 
hand, the depression and world- 
weariness which haunted the decadent 
heterogeneous people of Alexandria 
and the East. Now it is clear that for 
the former of these Nietzsche had no 
understanding, since it lay quite be- 
yond his range of vision, whereas for 
the latter he had a very intimate un- 
derstanding and a bitter detestation. 
Hence his almost unreserved rejec- 
tion of Christianity as a product of 
corruption and race impurity. 

It is a mistake [he says in The Will to 
Power] to imagine that, with Christ- 
ianity, an ingenuous and youthful peo- 
ple rose against an old culture. . . . We 

57 



NIETZSCHE 



understand nothing of the psychology 
of Christianity, if we suppose that it 
was the expression of revived youth 
among a people, or of the resuscitated 
strength of a race. It is, rather, a typical 
form of decadence, of moral softening, 
and of hysteria, amid a general hotch- 
potch of races and people that had lost 
all aims and had grown weary and sick. 
The wonderful company which gath- 
ered round this master seducer of the 
populace, would not be at all out of 
place in a Russian novel: all the diseases 
of the nerves seem to give one another a 
rendezvous in this crowd. 

And elsewhere he says, more gen- 
erally: — 

Long pondering over the physiology 
of exhaustion forced upon me the ques- 
tion, to what extent the judgments of 
exhausted people had percolated into 
the world of values. 
58 



NIETZSCHE 



The result at which I arrived was as 
startling as it could possibly be — even 
for one like myself who was already at 
home in many a strange world. I found 
that all prevailing valuations — that is 
to say, all those which had gained as- 
cendancy over humanity, or at least 
over its tamer portions — could be 
traced back to the judgment of ex- 
hausted people. 



V 

Now all this is the perfectly correct 
statement of a half-truth, as any one 
must admit who is familiar with the 
religious history of Alexandria; it is 
largely correct also as regards the ro- 
mantic revival of Alexandrianism, 
which in Nietzsche's eyes made up the 
whole of modern Christianity. The 
fact is that his mind was really con- 
cerned with certain aspects of society 
as it existed about him, and his hos- 
tility to the past was not to the dead 
centuries in themselves, but to what 
remained over from them in the pre- 
sent — for what, after all, is there for 
any man in the past to hate or fear, 
except as it lives and will not be put 
away? In the sickness of his soul Nietz- 
60 



NIETZSCHE 



sche looked abroad over the Western 
world, and saw, or thought he saw, 
everywhere futility and purposeless- 
ness and pessimistic uncertainty of the 
values of life. An ideal, as he sees it, 
is embraced only when a man's grip 
on the real world and its good has 
been weakened; in the end such super- 
natural ideals, as they are without 
foundation in fact, lose their hold on 
the human mind, and mankind, hav- 
ing sacrificed its sense of actual val- 
ues and having nursed the cause of 
decay, is left helpless and joyless. 
This condition he calls Nihilism. 
"People have not yet seen what is so 
perfectly obvious," he says, — "name- 
ly, that Pessimism is not a problem 
but a symptom — that the term ought 
to be replaced by ' Nihilism'; that the 
question, 'to be or not to be, 5 is itself 
61 



NIETZSCHE 

an illness, a sign of degeneracy, an 
idiosyncrasy." And in the first part 
of The Will to Power he unfolds this 
modern disease in all its hideousness. 
The restless activities of our life he 
interprets as so many attempts to 
escape from the gloom of purposeless- 
ness, as so many varieties of self-stupe- 
faction. No one can read his list of 
these efforts without shuddering recol- 
lection of what decadent music and 
literature and painting have pro- 
duced: — 

In one's heart of hearts, not to know, 
whither? Emptiness. The attempt to 
rise superior to it all by means of emo- 
tional intoxication : emotional intoxica- 
tion in the form of music, in the form of 
cruelty in the tragic joy over the ruin 
of the noblest, and in the form of blind, 
gushing enthusiasm over individual 
62 



NIETZSCHE 



men or distinct periods (in the form of 
hatred, etc.). The attempt to work 
blindly, like a scientific instrument; to 
keep an eye on the many small joys, like 
an investigator, for instance (modesty 
towards one's self) ; . . . the mysticism 
of the voluptuous joy of eternal empti- 
ness; art "for art's sake" ("le fait"), 
"immaculate investigation," in the 
form of narcotics against the disgust of 
one's self; any kind of incessant work, 
any kind of small foolish fanaticism. 

The attempt to maintain Christ- 
ianity amidst a nihilistic society which 
has lost even its false ideals, can have 
only one result. As these supernatural 
ideals were evoked by the weaker 
mass of the race to cover its subjec- 
tion to the few stronger individuals, 
so when belief in the other world has 
perished, the only defence that re- 

6 3 



NIETZSCHE 



mains is the humanitarian exaltation 
of the humble and common and un- 
distinguished in itself as a kind of 
simulacrum of Christianity, the un- 
ideal sympathy of man for man as a 
political law, the whole brood of so- 
cialistic schemes which are based on 
the notion of universal brotherhood. 
These, the immediate offspring of 
Rousseauism and German romanti- 
cism, are, as Nietzsche saw, the actual 
religion of the world to-day; and 
against these, and against the past as 
the source of these, his diatribes are 
really directed. His protest is against 
"sympathy with the lowly and the 
suffering as a standard for the eleva- 
tion of the soul. " 

Christianity [he exclaims] is a degen- 
erative movement, consisting of all 
kinds of decaying and excremental ele- 

6 4 



NIETZSCHE 



ments It appeals to the disinherited 

everywhere; it consists of a foundation 
of resentment against all that is success- 
ful and dominant: it is in need of a 
symbol which represents the damna- 
tion of everything successful and domi- 
nant. It is opposed to every form of 
intellectual movement, to all philosophy; 
it takes up the cudgels for idiots, and 
utters a curse upon all intellect. Re- 
sentment against those who are gifted, 
learned, intellectually independent: in 
all these it suspects the elements of suc- 
cess and domination. 

All this is merely Nietzsche's spas- 
modic way of depicting the uneasi- 
ness of the age, which has been the 
theme of innumerable poets of the 
nineteenth century — of Matthew 
Arnold, to take an instance, in his 
gloomy diagnosis of the modern soul. 

65 



NIETZSCHE 



And to a certain point the cause of 
this Nihilism, to use Nietzsche's word, 
is the same for him as for Arnold. 
They both attribute it to the shatter- 
ing of definite ideals that had so long 
ruled the world, and especially to the 
waning of religious faith. But here 
the two diagnosticians part company. 
Arnold looked for health to the estab- 
lishing of new ideals and to the growth 
of a fresh and sounder faith in the 
Eternal, though he may have failed 
in his attempt to define this new faith. 
Nietzsche, on the contrary, regarded 
all ideals and all faith as themselves a 
product of decadence and the sure 
cause of deeper decay. "Objection, 
evasion, joyous distrust, and love of 
irony," he says, "are signs of health; 
everything absolute belongs to path- 
ology." Nihilism, as the first conse- 
66 



NIETZSCHE 



quence of the loss of ideals, may be a 
state of hideous anarchy, but it is also 
the necessary transition to health. If, 
instead of relapsing into the idealistic 
source of evil, the eyes of mankind are 
strengthened to look boldly at the 
facts of existence, then will take place 
what he calls the Transvaluation of 
all Values, and truth will be founded 
on the naked, imperishable reality. 
There is no eternal calm at the centre 
of this moving universe; "all is flux"; 
there is nothing real "but our world of 
desires and passions," and "we can- 
not sink or rise to any other c reality' 
save just the reality of our impulses — 
for thinking itself is only a relation 
of these impulses to one another." So 
be it! When a man has faced this 
truth calmly and bravely and defi- 
nitely, then the whole system of mo- 

67 



NIETZSCHE 



rality which has been imposed upon 
society by those who regarded life as 
subordinate to an eternal ideal out- 
side of the flux and contrary to the 
stream of human desires and passions 
— then the whole law of good and evil 
which was evolved by the weak to 
protect themselves against those who 
were fitted to live masterfully in the 
flux, crumbles away; that man has 
passed Beyond Good and Evil. 

Mankind is thus liberated from the 
herd-law, the false values have been 
abolished, but what new values take 
their place? The answer to this ques- 
tion Nietzsche found by going to Dar- 
winism and raising the evolutionary 
struggle for existence into new sig- 
nificance; he would call it, "not the 
Schopenhauerian will to live, but the 
Will to Power. He thus expresses 
68 



NIETZSCHE 



the new theory in the mouth of 
Zarathustra : — 

Wherever I found a living thing, 
there found I Will to Power; and even 
in the will of the servant found I the 
will to be master. . . . 

And this secret spake Life herself 
unto me. " Behold,' ' said she, "I am 
that which must ever surpass itself." ... 

He certainly did not hit the truth who 
shot at it the formula: "Will to Exist- 
ence"; that will — doth not exist! 

For that which is not, cannot will^ 
that, however, which is in existence — 
how could it still strive for existence! 

Only where there is life, is there also 
will: not, however, Will to Life, but — 
so teach I thee — Will to Power! 

This is Nietzsche's transvaluation 
of all values, the change from the 
morality of good and evil depending 

6 9 



NIETZSCHE 



on supernatural rewards to the non- 
morality of the purely natural Will to 
Power. And as the former idealism 
resulted in the suppression of distinc- 
tion and in the supremacy of the fee- 
ble, so the regime of the Will to Power 
must bring back into society the sharp 
division of those who have power and 
those who have it not, of the true 
philosophers who have the instinct to 
surpass and the slaves whose function 
it is to serve and obey. The philoso-' 
pher, to use Nietzsche's famous term, 
is the Superman, the Uebermensch. 
He has passed beyond good and evil, 
and Nietzsche often describes him in 
language which implies the grossest 
immorality; but this is merely an 
iconoclast's way of emphasizing the 
contrast between his perfect man and 
the old ideal of the saint, and it would 
70 



NIETZSCHE 



be unfair to take these ebullitions of 
temper quite literally. The image of 
the Superman is, in fact, left in the 
hazy uncertainty of the future; the 
only thing certain about him is his 
complete immersion in nature, and 
his office to raise the level of society 
by rising on the shoulders of those 
who do the menial work of the world. 
At the last analysis the Superman is 
merely a negation of humanitarian 
sympathy and of the socialistic state 
of indistinguished equality. 



VI 

Nietzsche's conception of the Will 
to Power may seem to have brought 
us back by a long circuit to Hobbes's 
definition of human nature as "a per- 
petual and restless desire of power 
after power that ceaseth only in 
death"; but in reality there is a whole 
world between the two. In the level- 
ling principles against which Hobbes 
directed his theory of government 
there was little or nothing of that 
notion of sympathy which is rooted 
in Locke's naturalism and has its 
flower in German romanticism; nor, 
on the other hand, is there in the 
Hobbian picture of the natural state 
of mankind as a warfare of self-inter- 
ests any touch of that morbid exalta- 
72 



NIETZSCHE 



tion of the ego which developed as an 
inevitable concomitant of romantic 
sympathy. 

At the heart of Nietzsche's phil- 
osophy there is, in fact, a colossal self- 
deception which has no counterpart in 
Hobbism, and to which we shall find 
no key unless we bear in mind the 
long and regular growth of ideas from 
Locke to the present day. Nietzsche 
looked upon himself as, if not the 
actual Superman, at least an imper- 
fect type of what the Superman was 
to be; he thought of his rebellion as an 
exemplification of the Will to Power; 
whereas the hated taint of decadence 
had struck deep into his body and 
mind, while his years of philosophizing 
were one long fretful disease. He has 
himself, with the intermittent clair- 
voyance of the morbid brain, pointed 
73 



NIETZSCHE 



to the confusion of phenomena which 
has led his followers to admire his 
intellectual productivity as a proof of 
fundamental health. "History," he 
observes, "discloses the terrible fact 
that the exhausted have always been 
confounded with those of the most 
abundant resources. . . . How is this 
confusion possible? When he who 
was exhausted stood forth with the 
bearing of a highly active and ener- 
getic man (when degeneration implied 
a certain excess of spiritual and nerv- 
ous discharge), he was mistaken for the 
resourceful man. He inspired terror." 
By a similar illusion Nietzsche re- 
garded the self-assertive Superman as 
a true reaction against the prevalent 
man of sympathy and as a cure for 
the disease of the age. That much of 
Nietzsche's protest against the ex- 
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cesses of humanitarianism was sound 
and well directed, I for one am quite 
ready to admit. He saw, as few other 
men of our day have seen, the danger 
that threatens true progress in any 
system of education and government 
which makes the advantage of the 
average rather than the distinguished 
man its first object. He saw with ter- 
rible clearness that much of our most 
admired art is not art at all in the 
higher sense of the word, but an ap- 
peal to morbid sentimentality. There 
is a humorous aspect to his quarrel 
with Wagner, which was at bottom 
caused by the clashing of two insanely 
jealous egotisms. Nevertheless, there 
is an element of truth in his condem- 
nation of Wagner's opera as typical 
of certain degenerative tendencies in 
modern society; and many must agree 
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with him in his statement that Wag- 
ner " found in music the means of 
exciting tired nerves, making it there- 
by sick." Not without cause did 
Nietzsche pronounce himself "the 
highest authority in the world on the 
question of decadence." But the cure 
Nietzsche proposed for these evils 
was itself a part of the malady. The 
Superman, in other words, is a pro- 
duct of the same naturalism which 
produced the disease it would count- 
eract; it is the last and most violent 
expression of the egotism, or self- 
interest, which Hume and all his fol- 
lowers balanced with sympathy as 
the two springs of human action. 
Sympathy, as we saw, gradually 
usurped the place of self-interest as 
the recognized motive of virtue and 
the source of happiness, but here this 

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strange thing will be observed: where 
sympathy has been proclaimed most 
loudly in theory, self-interest has 
often been most dominant in practice. 
Sympathy first came to excess in the 
sentimental school, and the sentimen- 
talists were notorious for their morbid 
egotism. There may be some injus- 
tice to Sterne in Byron's sneering re- 
mark that he preferred weeping over 
a dead ass to relieving the want of a 
living mother, but in a general way it 
hits exactly the character of which 
the author of the Sentimental Journey 
was a type. I came by chance the 
other day upon a passage in an anony- 
mous book of that age, which ex- 
presses this contrast of theory and 
practice in the clearest terms : — 

By this system of things [that is, the 
sentimental system] it is that strict jus- 

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NIETZSCHE 



tice is made to give way to transient 
fits of generosity; and a benevolent turn 
of mind supplants rigid integrity. The 
sympathetic heart, not being able to 
behold misery without a starting tear 
of compassion, is allowed, by the general 
suffrage, to atone for a thousand care- 
less actions, which infallibly bring mis- 
ery with them. In commercial life, the 
Rich oppress the poor, and contribute 
to hospitals; a monopolizer renders 
thousands and tens of thousands desti- 
tute in the course of traffic; but cheer- 
fully solicits or encourages subscrip- 
tions to alleviate their distress. 1 

As for Rousseau, the great apostle 
of humanity, it is notorious that the 
principal trait of his disposition was 

1 John Buncle, Junior, Gentleman. 2 volumes. 
London, 1776, 1778. The hero is supposed to be 
the son of Amory's John Buncle. 

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an egotism which made it impossible 
for him to live at peace with his fellow 
men. " Benevolence to the whole spe- 
cies," said Burke, having Rousseau in 
mind, "and want of feeling for every 
individual with whom the professors 
come in contact, form the character 
of the new philosophy." No one who 
has read the annals of the romantic 
group of Germany need be told how 
their pantheistic philosophy was con- 
tradicted by the utterly impractical 
individualism of their lives. Nor is 
the same paradox absent from the 
modern socialistic theories that have 
sprung from romanticism; it would be 
possible, I believe, in many cases to 
establish from statistics a direct ratio 
between the spread of humanitarian 
schemes of reform and the increase of 
crime and suicide. 
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The truth is, this inconsistency is 
inherent in the very principles of ro- 
mantic naturalism. In a world made 
up of passions and desires alone, the 
attempt to enter into the personal 
emotions of others will react in an in- 
tensifying of our own emotions, and 
the effort to lose one's self in mankind 
will be balanced by a morbid craving 
for the absorption of mankind in one's 
self. The harsh contrast of sympathy 
and egotism is thus an inevitable con- 
sequence of romanticism, nor is it a 
mere chance that Tolstoy, with his 
exaltation of Rousseauism and of ab- 
solute non-resistance and universal 
brotherhood, should have been the 
contemporary of a philosopher who 
made Napoleon his ideal and preached 
war and the Superman as the healthy 
condition of society. Nietzsche him- 
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NIETZSCHE 



self, in one of his moments of insight, 
recognizes this coexistence of extremes 
as a sign of decadence. That they 
spring from the same source is shown 
by the unexpected resemblance they 
often display beneath their superficial 
opposition. Perhaps the book that 
comes closest to Zarathustra in its fun- 
damental tone is just the Leaves of 
Grass, which in its avowed philosophy 
of life would seem to stand at the re- 
motest distance. Nietzsche denounces 
all levelling processes and proclaims a 
society based frankly on differences of 
power; Walt Whitman, on the con- 
trary, denies all differences whatso- 
ever, and glorifies an absolute equal- 
ity: yet as both start from the pure 
flux of naturalism, so they both pass 
through a denial of the distinction 
of good and evil based on the old 
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NIETZSCHE 



ideals, and end in an egotism which 
brings aristocrat and democrat to- 
gether in a strange and unwilling 
brotherhood. 



VII 

To any one caught in this net, life 
must be a onesided fanaticism or a 
condition of vacillating unrest. The 
great tragedy of Nietzsche's existence 
was due to the fact that, while he per- 
ceived the danger into which he had 
fallen, yet his struggles to escape only 
entangled him more desperately in 
the fatal mesh. His boasted trans- 
valuation of all values was in reality 
a complete devaluation, if I may coin 
the word, leaving him more deeply 
immersed in the Nihilism which he 
exposed as the prime evil of modern 
civilization. With Hume and the 
romantic naturalists he threw away 
both the reason and the intuition into 
any superrational law beyond the 

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NIETZSCHE 



stream of desires and passions and 
impulses. He looked into his own 
heart and into the world of phenom- 
ena, and beheld there a ceaseless ebb 
and flow, without beginning, without 
end, and without meaning. The only 
law that he could discover, the only- 
rest for the mind, was some dimly 
foreseen return of all things back into 
their primordial state, to start afresh 
on the same dark course of chance — _ 
the Eternal Recurrence, he called it. 
"No doubt," he once wrote, "there is 
a far-off, invisible, and prodigious 
cycle which gives a common law to 
our little divagations: let us uplift 
ourselves to this thought! But our 
life is too short, our vision too feeble; 
we must content ourselves with this 
sublime possibility." At times he sets 
up the ability to look undismayed 

8 4 



NIETZSCHE 



into this ever-turning wheel as the 
test that distinguishes the Superman 
from the herd. And this is all Nietz- 
sche could give to mankind by his 
Will to Power and his Transvalua- 
tion of all Values : the will to endure 
the vision of endless, purposeless 
mutation; the courage to stand with- 
out shame, naked in a world of chance; 
the strength to accomplish — abso- 
lutely nothing. At times he proclaims 
his creed with an effrontery of joy 
over those who sink by the way and 
cry out for help. Other times pity for 
so hapless a humanity wells up in his 
heart despite himself; and more than 
once he admits that the last tempta- 
tion of the Superman is sympathy for 
a race revolving blindly in this cycle 
of change — " Where lie thy greatest 
dangers? In compassion." As for 
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himself, what he found in his philoso- 
phy, what followed him in the end 
into the dark descents of madness, is 
told in the haunting vision of The 
Shadow in the last section of Zara- 
thustra: — 

"Have I — yet a goal? A haven 
towards which my sail is set? 

"A good wind? Alas, he only who 
knoweth whither he saileth, knoweth 
also what wind is good and a fair wind " 
for him. 

"What still remaineth to me? A 
heart weary and flippant; a wandering 
will; fluttering wings ; a broken spine. 

"This seeking for my home: ah, Zara- 
thustra, knowest thou well, this seek- 
ing hath been my home-sickening; it 
devoureth me. 

"Where is — my home? For it I ask 
and seek and have sought, but have not 
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found it. Oh eternal everywhere, oh 
eternal nowhere, oh eternal — in-vain!" 
Thus spake the Shadow, and Zara- 
thustra's countenance grew longer at 
his words. "Thou art my Shadow!" 
said he at last, with sadness. 

The end of it all is the clamor of 
romantic egotism turned into horror 
at its own vanity and of romantic 
sympathy turned into despair. It is 
naturalism at war with itself and 
struggling to escape from its own 
fatality. As I leave Nietzsche I think 
of the ancient tragedy in which Hera- 
cles is represented as writhing in the 
embrace of the Nessus-shirt he has 
himself put on, and rending his own 
flesh in a vain effort to escape its pois- 
onous web. 

THE END 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



rEB 20 1912 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 
FEB 26 1912 



i 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



028 956 529 2 



